During Lenovo TechDay 2026 held today in Singapore, Lenovo introduced the fourth edition of the Lenovo CIO Playbook report, which is a report on companies' investments and plans for the year through the eyes of a company's Chief Information Officer/IT executive.
The report was prepared with the help of technology industry data collection company IDC (International Data Company) which interviewed 920 Chief Information Officers in the ASEAN+ region (Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan) in companies with a medium number of employees (200-999 employees) to giant corporations (>5000 employees).
Last year, it was seen that AI technology was used to improve the efficiency of these companies' IT departments such as in the data processing segment, company data security and others. This year, the integration of AI technology is expected to be increased to more departments of the company, including customer service, marketing, operations and finance.
Through this CIO Playbook report, it is also seen that [this year, 67 percent of the companies from ASEAN+ interviewed have already started implementing AI technology in their businesses, 15 percent of them have just started the implementation process, while 18 percent of them are still thinking about whether they need to use it.
The report shows that 88 percent of the companies that have already started using AI technology in this report expect a return on investment from the technology. The expectation is that this year, they can get a return of $2.85 for every $1.00 invested in the technology.
If the year 2025 saw the introduction of many AI technologies from large companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and others such as agentic AI, 2026 is seen as the year where companies in the ASEAN+ region will begin to integrate AI technology into their daily company operations.
According to the CIO Playbook 2026 report, companies' interest in implementing agentic AI is expected to double this year. 21 percent of companies surveyed in Asia Pacific reported that they have already implemented the technology in their daily activities.
Another 60 percent of companies said they are in the process of exploring the use of AI agents, and this includes companies in the telecommunications, healthcare and government sectors, which are among the sectors with the most complex operations.
The high interest in using AI agent technology does not necessarily mean that companies are ready to use it. Of the companies surveyed, 41 percent of them said that they need at least 12 months to prepare.
Among the challenges that are often mentioned are data security and governance, the quality of the data used and the complexity of introducing this new technology into existing systems.
Speaking of data security, 81 percent of companies in ASEAN+ said that if they want to implement AI technology, they are more comfortable using a hybrid AI infrastructure, combining cloud technology with infrastructure that stores critical data on their own premises.
This is to balance performance, security and ease of governance of company and customer data. Storing data on premises also speeds up access to data by company employees and also reduces the cost of maintaining servers and data centers and allows companies to more easily manage the inference capabilities and critical workloads that these AI systems need to perform.
To this end, Lenovo also introduced dedicated server products for AI use at the Lenovo Tech World event last week. These include the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675i for use with full-scale, large-scale, high-performance computing models, the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650i for powerful computing power that can be easily scaled, and the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE455i for on-premises inference capabilities that can be quickly and easily deployed.
